The purpose of a Craniosacral Therapy session is to help resolve patterns of disease and fragmentation by allowing the body to gently unwind at its own speed. Using highly sensitive palpation and intuitive skills, Erinn listens to your body's subtle rhythms, reads the story of your body, identifies places where dysfunction has settled and allows your body to set the priorities for healing. Bones, organs, muscles and scar tissue may all unwind during a session. The work can be so subtle that you feel virtually nothing during a session, or depending on what your body is working through, it can be very emotional, painful or invigorating. You might remain lying on your back the entire time, or find yourself going into a therapeutic position to assist release. Either way, your body is moving toward health and no processes are judged as better, worse, more or less effective. Advanced sessions may involve combining gentle hands-on unwinding with verbal dialoging or work inside the mouth (with gloves), and a SomatoEmotional Release may occur at any time during any level of treatment.

The body often retains the imprint of physical forces from accidents, injuries or emotional shock and stress. If the body cannot dissipate the force at the time of the event, it concentrates and isolates it away from the rest of the body, building a container for this chaotic energy called an "energy cyst", much like an oyster will make a pearl. Over time, it takes increasing amounts of energy to maintain these cysts which may lead to pain, dysfunction and fatigue. To the body, events from many years ago or even birth can feel like they happened yesterday. SomatoEmotional Release is an advanced technique that expands upon the skills of CranioSacral Therapy and helps you identify and expel the tension in areas of dysfunction, freeing up the considerable energy trapped there. Once the body is allowed to release an area using CranioSacral Therapy or SomatoEmotional Release, it does not need to be repeated, so the effects of sessions are cumulative, whether you come 4 times a week or once a year.

A CranioSacral session gives you time to listen deeply to your body. Even though it is primarily a physical modality, clients often experience it as a highly creative state where solutions come easily, truths are understood and imbalances are brought to light. This type of therapy is particularly effective at finding and resolving the source of any type of pain (physical or emotional), faster post-surgical rehabilitation, improving function of nerve damaged areas, healing from post-traumatic stress including assault, abuse or other trauma, burn-out, scattered thinking, attention deficit disorders and other conditions that affect our ability to be centered and mentally sharp. Additionally, many clients use the often sacred time of a CranioSacral session to enhance, discover or deepen their connection to their Inner Wisdom, Intuition, or Spirit with far-reaching benefits outside of the session. Structurally, the benefits of Craniosacral therapy are similar to chiropractic, and indeed many chiropractors receive training in CST. The difference is that a CranioSacral therapy session focuses on how the soft tissue affects the spine rather than the spine's affect on the soft tissue. It also encourages the client's body to unwind from the inside rather than being adjusted from an outside force.

Although the protocol established by The Upledger Institute for advanced therapists is closely followed, the type of work done is often very different from what many clients have experienced before. For instance, perhaps you received work only on the bones of the head, or have never done dialoging as part of a session. Since Craniosacral Therapy is an osteopathic term, there are other, very-different methods that use the same term such as Cranial-Sacral Therapy and Biodynamic CranioSacral Therapy. It is recommended that clients come in to try a session and ask any questions that may arise.

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